BUHARI: It pays to persist

IF the policy of one couple, four children that General Ibrahim Babangida lamely tried to introduce (and became the first to violate) in the late 1980’s to tackle population explosion were operational in Nigeria back in 1942, Muhammadu Buhari, son of Zulaihat and Adamu, would not have been born.

 

MAN-OF-THE-YEAR-FRONT Buhari

He was the 23rd child of his family. It was from the bottom of that heap of siblings that God selected a man who now presides over the 170 million-strong black nation on earth as an elected president.

Buhari is only the second person dead or alive, that has ruled Nigeria as a military officer and later got elected by popular mandate.

Born in Daura on 17th November 1942, Muhammadu’s father died when he was four years old, and the boy had to be raised by his widowed mother.

The young lad with a tall, straight, gangling bearing received his primary education in Daura and Mai’Adua before proceeding to Katsina College.

Struggle for supremacy

It was while he stayed in Katsina that he made contact with Yar’ Adua family and got acquainted with two sons of the family who were later to play front line roles in the evolving history of Nigeria – the late General Shehu Musa Yar’ Adua and late President Umaru Yar’ Adua.

The family’s patriarch, Alhaji Musa Yar’ Adua, was a high ranking chieftain of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) who later became Minister for Lagos Affairs.

Yar’ Adua personally named the Bar Beach ocean front after Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, an event that has deep roots in the struggle for supremacy among the founding fathers of Nigeria.

Reports have it that in the period shortly after Nigeria’s independence, there was a massive drive to recruit and enlist as many young, vibrant and able-bodied senior students in secondary schools across the North in the Army and Police.

Buhari was caught in this scheme, and he was already in the military school in 1962 before his Cambridge West Africa School Certificate was issued.

Beyond the fact that, as a young officer, he fought in the civil war that erupted after the coups and counter-coups of January and July 1966, very little was heard of Buhari until 30th July 1975, when he had become a Lieutenant Colonel.

He participated in the coup that ousted General Yakubu Gowon, the wartime head of state who ruled Nigeria for a record nine straight years.

Buhari was appointed as the Military Governor of Nigeria’s largest state about a fifth of the size of the entire country, the North Eastern State, which today has been split into six states (Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe, Adamawa and Taraba States).